The speed with which it happened prevented users from accessing their data, highlighting the risks of decentralized social media without backups. Its administrator ceased operations, causing confusion and data loss for many healthcare professionals who had signed up as an alternative to Twitter.

This event serves as a reminder: Wherever you are on Mastodon, back up your data!

WARNING: To help Med-mastodon users who have returned to the Fediverse, the Poliverso staff has created the Friendica group @medmastodon

If you follow this group, you can:

Follow it and mention it in your messages, and it will reshare all your public posts addressed to it (this only applies to an initial message, not a reply to another message).
Follow it only to read all the messages from fellow doctors who send messages through it.

#MedMastodon

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[–] Pamasich@kbin.earth 5 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Oh, and the instance actually does return an error page saying "This instance is under maintenance.", so it's remotely possible that this Friendica message is based on misinformation, and that the instance being "down" may be only temporary? (I have no idea)

For some reason Piefed is removing the title of the post, which links to a Reddit thread as a source. That thread clarifies: "I emailed the address given on the page and was told the instance service was cancelled by the instance owner and it's unknown whether there was a plan to migrate or just shut down completely".

Looking at the under maintenance page myself, the email seems to be the server host's, so this isn't the instance owner being unsure about their future plans yet, it means the hosting relationship is cancelled and the host doesn't know about things beyond that.

[–] OpenStars@piefed.social 3 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Thank you for the correction and additional information.

@rimu@piefed.social a bug report: Piefed is removing the title of the post, which profoundly affects its understandability.

[–] rimu@piefed.social 4 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Haha friendica puts the post title and link IN the post content as HTML!

<h1><b><a href=\"https://www.reddit.com/r/Mastodon/comments/1pxtglg/my_instance_went_dark_is_there_any_possibility_of//" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Unfortunately, the popular MedMastodon server, dedicated to doctors and medicine, unexpectedly shut down at the end of 2025.</a></b></h1>

sigh

[–] rimu@piefed.social 4 points 3 days ago (1 children)

@OpenStars@piefed.social I've written a fix for this, so Friendica posts like that will be rendered better.

[–] OpenStars@piefed.social 1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

So quick, that's fantastic! 🤩

[–] rimu@piefed.social 5 points 3 days ago (1 children)

It's not released yet, this fix will come out with v1.5.

I'm probably going to switch to making smaller releases from now on (one big monster every 4-6 weeks contains too many changes for people to really absorb and understand) so 1.5 might be sooner than you expect.

[–] OpenStars@piefed.social 1 points 3 days ago

That makes perfect sense, and I suppose posts such as this are rare, and people in this community are likely to still remember this situation if it happens again in the short interim.:-)

[–] piratepost@poliverso.org 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

@OpenStars Great update: MedMastodon is back online and its users should be able to access their data.

[–] OpenStars@piefed.social 1 points 1 day ago

@piratepost@poliverso.org that's wonderful! And as Rimu mentioned the PieFed software will be fixed in the next release to help facilitate future cross-platform communications, this has been a very encouraging post!:-)